----- Original Message ----- From: "Soren Andersen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 3:17 PM
> - can one safely assume that a noobie who finds Cygwin grasps that the > tools that are packed with cygwin (bash, login, man, for example) aren't > specific to Cygwin at all but long predate it, and Can we? The newbie who finds cygwin because they are told to by a friend, may not have any unix background, and therefore see *nothing* to cause them to realise that the tools come from elsewhere - particularly Win32 users, where MS provide *everything* (or so they may think). > - can one safely assume that noobies will think "these tools that i am > given with Cygwin run the same 'on cygwin' as they do on any Uni* -like > platform (and therefore general documentation 'out there' will apply too), >From experience on this list, I can assert that this is an unsafe assumption. Many many many questions are asked that are solveable by simple examination of existing documentation - like the recent lex->flex question (while I didn't know that answer, that's gotta be a flex FAQ!). > and > - can one safely assume that noobies who might even guess at the first two > points might not think anyway that "maybe I'll find friendlier, more > sympathetic folks to hold my trembling timorous hand here, than I would if > I ventured onto onto the Wierd Wild Web in search of generalized help on > these tools"? (Point of this last is not to characterize the cygwin list as > "nasty" or to propose that it self-characterize this way, but to suggest > that a LITTLE warning of a slightly stern-sounding nature at the "front > door" might be expeditious and appropriate given that folks on this list > BAL [By And Large] clearly DON'T want anymore to answer questions like > "what does man do" or "how do I login to bash"). Good point. > > Unless there is one single extremely knowledgeable and encyclopedically- > oriented person who knows where to send people (and such people do exist I > think, but whether one will care to undertake this is another question) > then I think that a little project (or a little "coordinated multi-person > collaboration", for lovers of ornate terminology!) needs to be created to > develop and verify a list of > resources to send such visitors to. > > The task (of writing up re-directions for some of these categories or > inquiries) can be done once, -- to set up more precise explanations and > info at the site; or it can be done as its been done, repeated over and > over again as similar questions appear on the list and are answered one at > a time. I can make an assertion here: contribute patches. Contribute the links *you know* (come on' after more than a years use you must have collected a few useful links). Don't worry about whether they are the best links, that's what open source doco is for! If *you* don't, and noone else *does*, then nothing will happen, and in 6 months Chris will say "I've been cogitating..." As a side note: Perhaps we can have a homepage link in setup.ini (and thus the package listing too) for each package? Rob -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
